The Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) published its twelfth report in July last year. The report entitled – “a recipe for rip offs”: time for a new approach, was put before the House of Commons for consideration. The PASC expressed concern about the Government’s over-reliance on an “oligopoly” of large suppliers, the costs and risks arising from skills gaps within Whitehall, the problems arising from legacy information technology (IT) systems, and weaknesses in the Government’s capacity to plan and drive through wholesale change in the way it uses and exploits IT in delivering public services. The Committee also explored some possible ways in which the delivery of public services online could be reformed—and transformed—through a combination of data release, giving individuals control of their own personal records, engaging users (both within and outside Government) in the design of services, and opening up the online delivery of services to a wider range of organisations. Continue reading…

Welcome to Big Data Analytics, 2012, the UK’s largest and most prestigious cross-industry event for the Large Enterprise Sector. The event, which will be held the Hotel Russell, London on 20 June, 2012, will bring together CEO’s, Business Directors, Heads of BI, CIOs and IT executives to discuss data management, analysis, security and storage strategies and best practices. Big Data Analytics 2012 is an event geared to senior business and technology leaders who approve or recommend analytical systems and solutions that run against large data sets, and are planning an analytical project in the next 12 months. Continue reading…

Information and communications technology (ICT) is critical for the effective operation of government and the delivery of the services it provides to citizens and businesses. An efficient ICT system can offer key benefits, and give businesses and citizens simpler and more convenient access to transactional services and the opportunity to collaborate and share information. A cost-effective and functional ICT strategy is a fundamental tool that every modern state needs. The coalition government’s ICT strategy has been designed to deliver better public services for less cost, release savings by increasing public sector productivity and efficiency, and reduce the structural deficit in order to continue to fund front-line services. Continue reading…

The continuing economic recession and burgeoning national debt will eventually affect the pocket of every individual and business in the UK in the next two to three years as government cuts in funding start to bite. The cuts sadly are an economic necessity if the country is ever to get itself back onto a stable footing. However, subsidy reductions also strike at the very heart of government too. Nowhere is this demonstrated more clearly than in the governments ICT strategy. Continue reading…

It is becoming increasingly clear that an organization’s ability to achieve high performance in today’s shifting, competitive business landscape will be largely dependent on its ability to get the right information to the right person at the right time. With so much competition out there, and so much data being generated, it’s now become vital for enterprises to use big data-derived insights to identify important intelligence like hidden market trends, customer behavior and security breaches to create value and profit. With big data analytics, companies will have a greater degree of intelligence to help them make better-informed decisions, develop more timely strategies, spot disruptive trends, both positive and negative, and create new types of businesses. Whether you’re a large enterprise in the manufacturing industry or a non-profit organization in the public health sector, one message is coming through loud and clear: big data and big data analytics are going to transform the way businesses work.

So where is all this big data coming from?

Governments, businesses, individuals, and even machines are all contributing to the massive accumulation of data. Companies maintain vast amounts of transactional data, gathering information about their customers, suppliers, and operations. And the same is true for the public sector. Most countries in the world manage enormous datasets containing census data, health indicators, and tax and expenditure information. If you then add into that online and mobile financial transactions, social media traffic, and GPS coordinates, in other words, the kinds of activities that most of us do several times a day on our smartphones, we are currently amassing over 2.5 quintillion bytes of global big data daily.

It isn’t just humans who are contributing to the mass of information either: increasingly machine-to-machine communication is also creating huge amounts of data. Digital sensors are installed in shipping crates to track movement along a route and send the information to transportation companies; sensors in electrical meters measure energy consumption at regular intervals and report the information to utilities companies. The gathering of such information is becoming increasingly common. It’s estimated that are more than 30 million networked sensor nodes present in the transportation, automotive, industrial, utilities, and retail sectors today, and the number of these sensors is increasing at a rate of more than 30 percent per year.

How will we know if big data analytics actually adds value and efficiency to enterprise?

While big data may be big news right, it’s worth bearing in mind that it’s been around some time. It may now have come into mainstream consciousness, but some organizations have been using it for a while now and have been benefiting from the analysis of big data and data mining. Amazon is a prime example. The online retailer has been using data in this way for years and has utilised customer information, purchase history, and other data to power its recommendation system: that’s why the recommendations are so spookily accurate. Similarly online dating services have analysed big data to determine potential matches among their users, and sports teams put digital information to use in their recruitment strategies. Studies by bodies like the McKinsey Global Institute show that those companies which have been employing data-driven decision-making, achieve productivity gains that are 5 percent to 6 percent higher than other factors could explain.

Even in the public sector, big data analytics have been used to better identify needs, provide services, and predict and prevent crises among low-income populations. A new initiative by the United Nations, for example, is using natural-language processing software to predict job losses and spending reductions in the regions that are considered to be at risk. They will then be ahead of the game and able to help and agencies deal with any potential issues. During the cholera outbreak in Haiti in 2010 and 2011, researchers tracked the movement of people from the affected zones to new areas via data generated by SIM cards. This information helped aid organizations prepare for new outbreaks.